


Burn Invisible and Dim

by byzantienne



Category: History Boys (2006), History Boys - Bennett
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 19:11:37
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,161
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/601140
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/byzantienne/pseuds/byzantienne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>DAKIN: Are we scarred for life, you think?</p>
<p>SCRIPPS: We must hope so. Perhaps it will turn me into Proust.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burn Invisible and Dim

**Author's Note:**

  * For [eudaimon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/eudaimon/gifts).



There pass the careless people  
That call their souls their own;  
Here by the road I loiter,  
How idle and alone.  
  
Ah, past the plunge of plummet,  
In seas I cannot sound,  
My heart and soul and senses,  
World without end, are drowned.

-from _Shropshire Lad XIV_ , A.E. Houseman. 

Scripps does not fall in love with Oxford the week of his interview, which he, on his knees in the college chapel and drawn as tight with longing as he's ever been, had entirely expected; but neither does he fall in love with it his first term. This latter failure is despite the city's best efforts, which are considerable. Going over Magdalen Bridge on a clear winter evening, Michaelmas seventh week just ending and the whole university rocketing Christmasward heedless of the calendar, Scripps feels the weight of nine hundred years of continuous history try to take root in his chest and knock him weightless. The façade of the Exam Schools glows in the reflected light of the streetlamps, and instead of the compulsion to weep or rejoice, what comes most strongly to mind is the injunction that really, he ought to write it down.

It rather takes the romance out of the equation.

He carries around a notebook in an over-nice leather cover that he'd bought new at a stationer's in Turl Street that he couldn't strictly afford, his first week of term. Its function is identical to the notebook he'd had back in Sheffield: a device for turning his life into a commonplace book. Any transmutative significance of clean unmarked pages and creaky unbent leather has so far failed him. If there has been a watershed, it was not coming to Oxford. 

But he'd written down Hector's funeral too: first bone-dry accounting, and then gobbets, the color of the light on Posner's hair with his head bowed, the ugly indulgence of noticing how Ms. Lintott looked after she'd spent a bit of time crying. 

His tutor, last week, had informed him that his essay was _vivid._ It had concerned seventeenth-century Scottish theology. Perhaps he should blame Irwin.

Posner surprises Scripps by coming out of the Univ gate just as if it was a turn of the hallway back at school, and nearly knocking him over. He is shorter and slighter than Scripps expects, a patent absurdity. He'd only spent his entire boyhood – a thing that, if it had come to conclusion at all, had done so barely three months previous – palling around with him. Posner apparently grows in the memory.

"Pos," he says. 

Posner startles and smiles. "Oh! Scrippsy – fancy running into you."

"You almost did," Scripps says. "I was beginning to think Oxford had snapped shut on you like a stuck clam."

"I've been busy," Posner says, easily and familiarly apologetic. His hands are bunched in the pockets of his coat, gloveless. "I just got out of a tute."

Scripps nods. There is an awkward hesitance, during which he wonders if seven weeks was enough to transform Pos into a stranger, some chilled and nervous young man on his way home to his college, a stock figure in someone else's winter scene.

"D'you want to get a pint," he says, finally. 

"You haven't mistaken your college for a monastery, then," Posner says. "I kind of thought, when you never visibly emerged."

"Merton's full of engineers, not monks."

"There's a persistent rumor that those are the same." He shrugs, as if the shrugging lets him come to a decision. "Yes."

"Yes, what?"

"Yes, I want to get a pint. Come on, then."

Scripps follows him into the warren of little streets off of Oriel Square. The inside of the pub they walk into is like being hit with a gentle wall of warmth and noise. The ceilings are low, the windows leaded and frosted at the corners. Scripps buys the round, since he suggested the pub in the first place. 

When he delivers Posner's pint to him, he says, "Awfully traditional pub."

Posner laughs. His laughter is brittle but unforced; it is just how it comes out of him. "We're at Oxford," he says. "Everything's traditional. Old. Tried and tested. One has to attempt to suit the atmosphere as best as one is capable."

"True enough. 'The very air seems eloquently fraught / with the deep silence of devoted thought'," says Scripps. 

Posner's grin is quicksilver. "I meant Waugh more than Montgomery. _Et in arcadia ego_ , and so on."

"Hector'd be horrified at us," Scripps says, before he thinks about it. It is the first thing he's said without thinking in weeks.

With his chin cupped in one hand, Posner still looks approximately fourteen. "Do you think of him?"

"Who has time," says Scripps, which is disloyal, and untrue.

"I do," Posner says. 

Scripps revises. "I've not got the heart for it, I think. Not now. Not yet." The pub is loud, a constant roar of gentle noise. It surrounds them. He wonders about little things, about whether Posner likes his tutors, if he's got a new set of friends. Scripps himself is indifferent to his tutors and, like saying that he doesn't think of Hector, finds the concept of new friends somewhat like contemplating breaking troth.

"Do you still go to church," Posner says, before Scripps can ask. 

"Yes. Do you still think of Dakin?"

Posner shrugs, an elegant little accession to inevitability. "He goes around the Radcliffe Camera looking picturesque. Love is very banal, and just as unchanging as our education in literature has led me to expect."

"So is God," says Scripps.

"At least God doesn't go around the Rad Cam and make eyes at girls."

"I might enjoy Him more if he did."

Posner raises one eyebrow, as if waiting for Scripps to go on. He doesn't – he isn't sure how. He should by rights be either more or less infatuated with God than he was before Oxford, as God is the only thing he consistently fails to commit to paper. _Not forever,_ he thinks, uncertain as to whether he implies believing or writing.

Posner drinks his pint. The knuckles on his hands are pale, and the oldest thing about him.

"We've a piano," Scripps says. "In my common room. You should come by sometime."

"I might," Posner says. "Next term."

(The piano will sit untouched by Scripps' hands all year. He will see Posner again on a sunny day in June, head bowed and walking alone, and not chase him down in favor of hurrying towards Collections and his own exam papers. 

The compulsive act of memorialization is difficult to shake. It will be a year after Scripps has his somewhat unexpected First and has gone down to London to discover the possibility of unmediated experience, a thing which he suspects Dakin knew first and best of all the Sheffield boys.

God does not, in the end, allow him to abandon Him like an outgrown overcoat. He is the only thing that refuses to change.)


End file.
